Jezebel's Daughter, Wilkie Collins

I had a cat once, called Cleopatra, she was grey and white, she had a sister, all black, named Bathsheba. Whom you see in this picture above, is an image like an afterthought, of the human Cleopatra, by John William Waterhouse (1888). One could have presumed that my black cat for it's sinister allusions to female malice should have been the one named Cleopatra, whereas the grey one for it's mellow coloring could have been the namesake of King David's wife, or actually the wife he stole from Uriah, the man he first killed so he could get her, because Bathsheba was like a sheep, like wolves prey (2 Samuel chapter 11). C.S. Lewis, in his book The Discarded Image - lectures on the medieval mind was right in saying that Western culture builds on the antiquity and the Bible. The archetypes and female characters echo way back and still exist in our time.

In the month of October a multitude of literary fans, book lovers and readers of mainly Western literature, gather in internet forums for the event of Victober, a month's worth of Victorian time reading. As a small tribute to the memory of a wonderful woman who had phenomenal insight into literature and shared her thoughts and ideas across the globe on her YouTube channel, I decided to read one of her favorite Victorian era writers, Wilkie Collins and the novel Jezebel's Daughter. 

The plot revolves around a widow named Mrs. Fontaine and her only daughter Minna. It's peculiar to me that Minna should be the name of the daughter, a symbol for Finland's very own Minna Canth, feminist hero, perhaps? Madam Fontaine is hard pressed on every side by financial debt and no way of securing her daughters future by a good marriage. Where there is no way, she makes a way by poisoning and murdering those who stand up against her, eventually leading to her own death. The plot is presented in a very theatrical way, no wonder, since the story originally was a play called The Red Vial.

I was left thinking on the caricature of Mrs. Fontaine, if she would have been a man, she would have been a criminal mastermind. The two poisons where allegedly used by the Borgia family (Lucretia and Cesare) in Mediaeval times. For Madame Fontaine the only part she was left to play was that of a Jezebel, the archetypical temptress leading men to evil. In reality the archetype of Jezebel says more about the men who allude to it than it tells of the actual life of Jezebel, Old Testament wife of Ahab. 

I think of tree types of women, The Mother of Sorrows - Mere de Douleurs who quietly suffers her fate, then there are the Minna Canths and Jane Eyres of fight their way trough life to establish a place, a room of ones own even at the cost of being an outcast. Then there is the warring woman, in who's way there is destruction. 

Typically women is not seen in western culture as a warriors, and rightfully one can question Madam Fontaines judgement in how far she went in her pursuit of controlling and manipulating events. The Dahomey warriors of Ghana were lethal women, amazons. 

The question presents itself, does a mother's love know no limits, is a mother prepared to do anything for her child, I believe she is. An afterthought is that Minna's own character was the antidote and solution the problem presented, she would have been well married even without the drastic measures that her mother took. Why is the female villain so demonized? Everybody still talks about Jezebel, forgetting what a bad king Ahab was.